Fleeing the Coast Before the Storm, Only to Be Trapped Inland

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Sgt. Jeremy Stellhorn of the National Guard carrying Cathalawa Olivia, 2, from a mobile home park in Lumberton, N.C., where more than a foot of rain fell in some areas.CreditCreditJonathan Drake/Reuters

CERRO GORDO, N.C. — Diamond Hansen and Darryl Clark rented a room in a Super 8 for a month, hoping it was a springboard to a fresh start in Myrtle Beach, S.C. Then the evacuation order came for Hurricane Matthew, so they climbed into Mr. Clark’s Volvo and drove to a place that seemed safe, his uncle’s house well inland in rural North Carolina. But it was far from the haven they expected.

Over the weekend, after the storm dropped torrential rain, the water rose waist-high outside the uncle’s Fair Bluff house and the couple evacuated again, this time by boat.

“My car is flooded, water clear over the top,” Mr. Clark, 38, said at a shelter in a high school here. “It kind of hurt a little bit,” he added. “But you can’t get mad with God.”

Some higher power may know exactly where hurricanes are going, but even with modern technology, humans have to guess. As countless residents and public officials learned in the last few days, this makes the question of evacuations — whether or when to flee, who is in danger and who is safe — an extraordinarily complicated call, and one particularly vulnerable to second-guessing.

“You’ve got to balance the issue of crying wolf, and whether people will pay attention the next time if the storm does not strike, with the potential for harm,” said Jim Hodges, a former governor of South Carolina, who was criticized for not being more forceful in ordering evacuations ahead of Hurricane Floyd in 1999. “You have to consider the economic issues, but I will say that the scales are tilted very heavily in favor of public safety.”

Flooding worsened on Monday in a waterlogged area of North Carolina south of Raleigh as the authorities scrambled to rescue people in Lumberton and numerous other cities faced rising waters.

More than two dozen people have been rescued by helicopter since the storm hit over the weekend, state officials said.

The storm left 11 people dead in North Carolina, about half the death toll in the United States, officials said. Unconfirmed estimates of deaths in Haiti have been as high as 1,000.

The authorities in North Carolina feared that swollen rivers would continue to rise, and the National Weather Service reported major flooding in more than a dozen areas, including Goldsboro, Rocky Mount and Manchester. Some local governments ordered residents to evacuate, and rivers were predicted to remain high for days.

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People walking through floodwaters in Lumberton, N.C., after Hurricane Matthew.CreditChris Keane/Reuters

“This storm is still impacting people in a big way,” said Gov. Pat McCrory, who surveyed hurricane damage on Monday in Fayetteville. “You have to see it to believe all the devastation that has occurred.”

Since the poorly planned evacuation of New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina approached in 2005, when thousands were left stranded, cities and counties have increasingly developed detailed evacuation plans. Such plans were put into action last week from Florida up through the Carolinas, as millions were ordered by state officials to leave coastal areas.

But every worrisome storm that ultimately falls short of doomsday raises fears that next time people may shrug off the call to evacuate. And in this storm, the worst damage occurred inland, in places like this that might typically be refuges for people fleeing the coasts.

Governors and county officials typically choose caution over risk. Inconveniencing people and disrupting businesses seem far less hazardous than endangering the lives of residents and emergency crews.

Gov. Rick Scott of Florida repeatedly urged people to evacuate, warning of a potentially catastrophic storm. Interviews indicated that most residents, both those who evacuated and those who did not, agreed with his response.

In South Carolina, Gov. Nikki R. Haley started evacuations four days before the storm.

In North Carolina, which faced an already weakened hurricane, places far from the ocean like Lumberton or Fair Bluff seemed unlikely to be danger zones and in need of evacuations. But on Monday, some residents, awash in flooding from the Lumber River, were stunned after the areas were hit with more than a foot of rain and floodwaters coursed the street. A few were irate and wished they had been evacuated.

“Friday, we go get a pack of ham and a loaf of bread,” said Robbie Chavis, 50, a resident of the Back Swamp area of Lumberton, where by Sunday roads had turned to ponds, farmland to streams, and neighborhoods into series of houses or trailers separated by canals. “We had no warning about this.”

Worried but helpless, Debra Holiday, 65, said her 91-year-old mother was stuck at home. “Her house is surrounded by water,” she said.

“My sister’s car is underwater,” Ms. Holiday added. “She’s been here 91 years, and she says she’s never seen it like this.”

Still, even on the coast, plenty of residents decided to ride out the storm.

Scott Thomas and Alex Hairfield, 22-year-old Citadel graduates who walked into a cafe in Charleston, said they briefly considered evacuating but decided that facing the storm would make for a better story.

“I kind of fear for the day that we do have a Hugo because there will be people like us who don’t want to leave,” Mr. Hairfield said, referring to the Category 4 hurricane in 1989 that caused billions of dollars in damage to South Carolina.

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Michael Lugo, the owner of Michael’s Tasting Room in St. Augustine, Fla., cooked short ribs for about 100 emergency workers before Hurricane Matthew hit. He experienced minor flooding in the storm.CreditCharlotte Kesl for The New York Times

Evacuations are not easy. Businesses lose money. Residents, many already exhausted from nailing plywood over windows, have to come up with an evacuation plan. Do they impose on relatives? Do they pay for a hotel, if they can even find one? Do they go to emergency shelters, typically uncomfortable and averse to pets?

Then there are those who want to evacuate but have no easy way to do so: people without cars, people who do not speak English well and may not understand directions on how to leave, older people, those with disabilities. Even tourists, who often know no one locally, can be at a loss on what to do.

John Renne, a professor at Florida Atlantic University’s School of Urban and Regional Planning who has studied hurricane preparations, said fewer than half the cities with evacuation plans had details for how best to help people lacking access to private transportation. Finding them is easy; census figures and local nonprofits can pinpoint where they are. What is missing, he said, is the will and the money.

“We haven’t learned a tremendous amount as a nation,” Professor Renne added, pointing out that the most comprehensive plans are in cities, like New Orleans, that have learned the hard way.

Some view a failure to evacuate as a selfish decision that elevates the risk for emergency crews. Michael Lugo, 42, the owner of Michael’s Tasting Room, which experienced minor flooding in St. Augustine, Fla., said he had cooked short ribs for about 100 emergency workers before Hurricane Matthew. They told him how worried they were about the residents and tourists on the coast who chose to stay behind.

“To see these first-responders and their stress,” Mr. Lugo said, “it’s just not fair to them.”

Weather data, which has become ever more precise, also complicates evacuations. While it has helped officials make earlier decisions, it has also empowered the armchair hurricane tracker.

“Everybody’s a meteorologist,” said Mr. Hodges, the former governor. “That’s part of the problem: They have access to much of the same information and will be trying to make their own decisions rather than waiting for some sort of specific evacuation order.”

Officials say the decisions can be extremely difficult.

“There’s no handbook or manual that tells you, ‘If this happens, evacuate this,’” said Mayor Lenny Curry of Jacksonville, Fla. He added that evacuating the areas closest to the St. Johns River was obvious but that it was a harder call for communities slightly farther away.

Some experts worry that a lull in hurricanes hitting the state over the past decade could breed false complacency. But many Floridians disagree.

“I’ve been through five or six evacuations,” said David R. Nelson, 54, who drove on Friday from Cape Canaveral to a shelter in an Orlando middle school. Dramatic warnings by government officials can be tiresome, he acknowledged. That does not mean he was going to ignore them.

“Let’s say nothing happens and people say they exaggerated,” Mr. Nelson said. “But they were in the right. Nobody has a crystal ball.”

Correction:Oct. 15, 2016

An article on Tuesday about damage from Hurricane Matthew in North Carolina misstated the name of the river that had flooded near the towns of Lumberton and Fair Bluff. It is the Lumber River, not the Lumberton.